Entertainment
Before Thanos, Josh Brolin Was a Terrifying Villain in This 2005 Thriller Now Streaming for Free
Before Josh Brolin became one of modern Hollywood’s go-to heavyweights in everything from Dune to the MCU, he was doing something a lot more ridiculous and a lot more 2000s: menacing a bunch of impossibly attractive treasure hunters in a scuba-diving crime thriller set in the Bahamas.
That movie was Into the Blue. And if you somehow missed this glossy, half-forgotten bit of sun-drenched nonsense the first time around, now is a very easy time to fix that. Into the Blue is currently streaming free on Tubi and Pluto TV. Released in 2005, Into the Blue follows a group of divers who discover both a legendary shipwreck and a crashed plane full of cocaine, which is obviously the kind of double jackpot that can only go badly. The film stars Paul Walker as Jared, Jessica Alba as Sam,Scott Caan as Bryce, Ashley Scott as Amanda, and Josh Brolin as Bates. It was directed by John Stockwell, who leaned hard into the movie’s mix of underwater adventure, crime-thriller tension, and unabashed beach-movie energy. It’s a totally inessential watch, but it looks great, it’s fun, and there are sharks. How’s that a bad thing?
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Is ‘Into the Blue’ Worth Watching?
Into the Blue cost about $50 million and brought in roughly $46.3 million worldwide, so it wasn’t exactly a hit, but it is also not hard to see why it has stuck around as a cable-and-streaming curiosity. The reputation is definitely mixed. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 20% from critics, with the site’s consensus basically saying all the beautiful people and underwater photography cannot save the plot from sinking. That sounds harsher than the movie really plays today, because the appeal here is obviously not some tightly coiled masterpiece of suspense, it’s silly, frothy nonsense. The esteemed critic Roger Ebert recommended it, awarding it 3/4 and adding:
“Into the Blue” offers modest pleasures. It is not an essential film, but if you go to see it, it will not insult your intelligence, and there’s genuine suspense toward the end. It is a well-made example in a genre that has been cheapened and made routine. There’s evidence the filmmakers spent more time talking about the characters and story than about how special effects would allow them to cheat on the narrative logic. And at the end of the film, there are some small surprises about who has survived and who has not. Usually you can predict the final head count at the end of the first act.
Into the Blue is streaming now, for free.
- Release Date
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September 30, 2005
- Runtime
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110 minutes
- Director
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John Stockwell